The First’s subject is as hoary as Horace: those who cross the ocean change their sky but not their soul. Ed Cumming, The Independent

Since publication of The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, in 1897, popular imagination has been gradually, but increasingly, drawn to the idea of human beings traveling to, and colonizing, the planet Mars. Every decade a new collection of books and films are released exploring scenarios about whether life exists, or ever existed, on Mars, whether Martians would be benign, or hostile, and whether the planet could sustain our own human life, should we be able to figure out a way to get there and settle. Although we have landed men on the moon, that journey was only a mere 384,000 km from Earth, whereas Mars is 54.6 million km away.

The latest Mars dreaming is the new eight-episode series created by the British television network, Channel 4, and US streaming service, Hulu,The First, starring Sean Penn. It was created by Beau Willimon, the writer-producer behind the American adaption of the BBC’s House of Cards.

The drama, in the premiere season of The First, takes place in the not-too-distant future and focuses on the astronauts, their families, and the ground crew, rather than actual flight and experiences on Mars. Rob Thomas, of The Capital Times, wrote:

Beau Willimon seems to be atoning for House of Cards with his new Hulu series The First. Whereas Netflix’s first big hit, often focused on the worst about humanity — not just evil but ambition, greed and weakness — his new show The First reminds us of the best about us.

In The First, Tom Hagerty (Sean Penn), has been recently replaced as commander of the space rocket, Providence, for the initial manned mission to Mars. From home, he watches on a monitor as the launch catastrophically fails due to an infinitesimal technical error. Laz Ingram (played by Natascha McElhone), CEO of Vista, the private aerospace program responsible for the project, is tasked to justify the funding for a second attempt. Hagerty has been estranged from his daughter, Denise, (Anna Jacoby-Heron), since the death of her mother, but the two are working at reconciliation. When the second Mars launch is approved, Ingram gives Hagerty a second chance, asking him to lead the new mission. Hagerty had been the ‘thirteenth man to walk on the moon’ and his daughter blames the sustained anxiety her family suffered, of not knowing if he would return, for her mother’s depression and death. Denise is also a recovering addict who has been through rehabilitation. The Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), previously sent to Mars, and a vital component to how the astronauts will return to Earth, malfunctions creating concerns that the second trip will now be too great a risk.

This becomes compounded by one of the five astronauts suffering health complications and having to be replaced at the last minute. CEO Ingram and her engineers discover a way to remotely repair the MAV and the mission is again green-lighted. Father and daughter have a violent disagreement over the mission and she runs away from home, returning to drugs. When she is arrested, rather than call her father, she contacts Ingram who bails her out, allowing her to stay, temporarily, in the guesthouse, to keep some distance from her father. Ingram’s motivation here is also clearly to protect her new commander from unnecessary family stress, which was the main cause of him being removed from the first mission. Hagerty is willing to resign from the project for his daughter, but she decides to break all contact with him. With no way to resolve the impass with her, Hagerty agrees to command the second Mars mission. Season One closes with the successful launch of Providence 2.

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: the Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; to the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. John Updike

To better appreciate The First, it is helps to look at the evolution of the mythology about Mars, in the cultural imagination, over the past century.

Between the time The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, was first published, in 1897, and Orson Wells’ famous Mercury Theatre radio broadcast of it, in 1938, on Halloween Eve, which radio listeners thought was an actual Martian invasion, causing utter panic in the streets, there was not much serious interest in Mars.

In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs released a book titled Princess of Mars, the same year he published Tarzan of the Apes. Both were successful and Burroughs went on to write twenty-three more novels about Tarzan and ten more in the Mars series.

In the nascent world of film-making, of 1918, there had been a Danish four-minute short called Das Himmelschiff (A Trip to Mars) in which a professor uses a magical powder to reach the Red Planet, where he encounters a threatening creature and attacking trees. It was inspired by Georges Méliès’s 1902 equally brief five-minute French short, Le Voyage dans la Lune, (A Trip to the Moon), memorable for the scene where the bullet-like rocket capsule pokes the ‘man in the moon’ in the eye!

But it wasn’t until 1948, when German scientist and genius, Wernher von Braun published a non-fiction book titled The Mars Project, a technical and scientifically well-considered plan for a manned expedition to Mars, that the government began to actually take the idea of Mars exploration to heart.

Von Braun had been involved in the Nazi V-2 rocket program during World War II. On December 16, 1944, the first day of the Ardennes Offensive, a V-2 rocket, fired by the SS Werfer Battery, destroyed the Rex Cinema in Antwerp, Belgium, killing 567 people, including 296 Allied soldiers, who were watching a 1936 American western, The Plainsman, the highest death count from a single rocket attack in the war.

Von Braun relocated to the US, with 1500 other German scientists, between 1945 -1959, during Operation Paperclip, where he began working for the US Army on intermediate range ballistic missiles. He eventually spearheaded the technology that launched NASA’s first satellite, Explorer 1 and also became the chief scientist of the Saturn V launch vehicle that powered the Apollo rockets.

As a child, he had been inspired by Kurd Lasswitz’s 1897 book, Auf Zwei Planeten (Two Planets), a German sci-fi classic, that described a race of Martians traveling between their planet and Earth using a material that was immune to gravity.

Von Braun became a strong advocate of a manned mission to Mars and his book, The Mars Project, was called "the most influential book on planning human missions to Mars" in a report prepared for the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.

In the decades following this publication, Hollywood began to timidly approach the idea of films about Mars with humorous movies such as Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1965).

Von Braun had also been an active campaigner for establishing a lunar base on the Moon and after the Soviets launched Sputnik, initiating the space race, von Braun presented his plan for a projected lunar landing by the year 1965. President John F Kennedy, looking for an important project to galvanize the American people, signed off on it and, by 1969, Americans were walking on the moon. This extraordinary event awakened very real possibilities that a trip to Mars was next in the queue.

I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars. Ray Bradbury

One of the most memorable and extremely frightening sci-fi films I experienced, as a youngster, in 1953, was Invaders From Mars. Told from a child’s point of view, a boy witnesses a flying saucer crash into a sand pit behind his house. Later, he discovers his parents and other local neighbours, police and politicians have acquired stitched incisions in the backs of their necks where crystal implants have been inserted, by aliens, creating cold unemotional puppet-like versions of everyone he knows, now doing the bidding of the Martians. I hid behind my seat during the scenes of the alien device with the long needle-like probe penetrating the back of his mother’s neck!

Three years later, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, (1956) presented a similar scenario: alien spores fall from space, turning into large pod plants and anybody getting to close becomes replicated with exact copies of themselves - except devoid of human emotion. This film was responsible for the popular slang term: ‘pod person’ - one who goes along lemming-like with the crowd.

Both of these mind-control movies came out during the peak of the Red Scare boom of the 50s. Critic and author, Victoria O'Donnell wrote:

"Red," of course, was the buzzword for Communists throughout the fifties, and, like the Martians, the "Reds" were different from Americans. The Martians were represented as cold, devious, ruthless, and dangerous, characteristics commonly associated with the Soviet Communists.

Rod Serling, in his popular weekly TV series, The Twilight Zone, dealt with Mars metaphorically. In 1960, with People Are Alike All Over, an injured astronaut landing on Mars encounters friendly locals, human-like, who treat his wounds and offer him a well-equipped residence - which later turns out to be a ‘habitat’ in a Martian zoo.

Throughout his life, Serling spoke out against racism and McCarthyism but was forbidden by television censorship from addressing these issues directly, for fear of alienating show sponsorship. His widow, Carol Serling, said, ‘…but with The Twilight Zone, sponsors basically just didn't understand what he was doing.’

O'Donnell says:

By one estimate, five hundred film features and shorts were produced between 1948 and 1962) [as] science fiction films presented indirect expressions of anxiety about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust or a Communist invasion of America. These fears were expressed in various guises, such as aliens using mind control, monstrous mutants unleashed by radioactive fallout, radiation's terrible effects on human life, and scientists obsessed with dangerous experiments. Although both government and private groups discouraged criticism of U.S. policies and expressions of fear about national security during the Cold War, the producers of science fiction films were generally left alone by government regulators and the private groups that tried to shape public opinion.

In 1980, NBC, collaborating with the BBC, created a 3-episode mini-series, The Martian Chronicles, starring Rock Hudson, based on Ray Bradbury’s 1950 collection of stories, of the same name. Bradbury had originally submitted a folder of diverse short stories, most of them set in America, to his publisher who suggested he tie the stories together by relocating all of them on Mars. Bradbury agreed and they came up together with the title. It became a classic and one of the top ten books of the 50s. However, when Bradbury saw the 80s television mini-series, he commented: "just boring".

Dozens of films about Mars have filled the gap between the 80s and now. Total Recall, (1990), written by Philip K. Dick, and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, concerns a man whose memory has vanished and travels to a very comfortably colonized Mars in search of his identity.

Mission to Mars (2000), directed by Brian De Palma, starring Gary Sinese, Tim Robbins and Connie Nielsen - one of the most beautifully made of all the Mars expedition films - involves a rescue mission to bring home the lone survivor of a previous failed expedition. They discover remnants of an ancient civilization indicating Earth itself had been originally seeded by Martians, millions of years ago, who had been striving to escape their own doomed planet. (This scenario, ironically, is exactly the reverse of entrepreneur Elon Musk’s vision: humans settling, or ‘seeding’, Mars to insure against possible extinction on Earth).

In The Martian, (2015) starring Matt Damon, and directed by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner and Alien), based on the fine novel by Andy Weir, the story centres on an Earth astronaut mistakenly left behind on Mars who subsequently has to use his wits to survive. It was a box-office smash, winning a Golden Globe for Best Picture and seven Academy Award nominations, earning almost ¾ of a billion dollars at the box office and became Scott’s most financially successful film.

With Mars now firmly back in the driver’s seat in Hollywood, Ron Howard, in 2016, created a television mini-series, Mars, innovatively intertwining present day interviews of figures currently working on the Mars mission, counter-pointed against a fictional account of a successful Mars landing and small pioneering settlement, in the year 2033. The uniqueness of this editing technique is that it portrays current NASA technology and space programs, through actual documentary footage, as a ‘look back’ at how things were that led to successful colonization.

In Howard’s Mars series, the mission reaches the planet, the crew survives an off-course landing, struggling with their injured captain, on foot, 75 km, to their base station. The original plan envisioned them landing right next to it and living on the ship while developing the resources of the camp, but now they have to figure out how to survive without ship safety. The key to viability of future missions also require them to locate a water source. By 2037, other ships and astronauts begin arriving but after an unexpected month-long dust storm, and the psychological breakdown of the key botanist, the plan is looking unviable. In the final episode, just as the mission is to be abandoned, microscopic Martian life is discovered, justifying all the sacrifice and risk. As a counterpoint to this 2033 future scenario, we see, braided in with the fiction, actual 2016 documentary footage of astronaut Scott Kelly spending months training in extended solitude on the International Space Station and we also hear about the work of Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, to create a reusable and relandable rocket.

I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact. Elon Musk

The most visible and charismatic face, today, of the dream to travel to Mars is South African CEO and lead designer of SpaceX, Elon Musk. Musk (47) has a net worth of $22 billion and is listed by Forbes as the 54th richest person in the world. He is also the co-founder, CEO and product architect of Tesla. An online bank he started, X.com, later became PayPal, which was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion. He founded SpaceX with $US100 million of his fortune. SpaceX is the largest private producer of rocket engines in the world and the first commercial company to launch a vehicle to the International Space Station. It was awarded a contract, in 2006, from NASA, to resupply it. Musk labels himself half-Democrat (socially liberal) and half-Republican (fiscally conservative) and believes all transportation on Mars (due to lack of oxygen) will be via electric cars, trains and aircraft. (That’s pretty handy, especially when you own Tesla!) He is the prime advocate of the ‘reusable’ rocket, believing this will reduce the cost of interplanetary travel by ‘a factor of 10’, saying, ‘if you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive.’

Howard’s Mars series is extremely detailed about the difficulties the Martian expedition will present, but is remarkably uncritical about how these difficulties will be solved.

For instance, besides the six to seven-month one-way travel time to Mars, temperature and atmosphere are incompatible with human life, without protective shelter. Highs of 20° C at noon are countered by extreme lows of -153° C at the poles, with a common value calculated at -63° C. Talcum-powder-fine dust storms form clouds 100 km above the surface that cover the planet, blocking the sun, for a month at a time. The contained shelters required for survival would be vulnerable to degradation over time similar to housing on earth. We all have leaks, foundation settling, wall cracks and other various problems here in our relatively benign climate– imagine what kind of dangers are implied on a planet whose natural atmosphere can kill humans?

Two proposed solutions, other than living in sanitized shelters permanently, are: terraforming the Martian surface, to make it human-friendly and genetic engineering to enable settlers to survive the climate, (both technologies currently impossible).

The film Red Planet (2000), starring Val Kilmer and Carrie-Anne Moss explores the former premise. Preparatory missions have been seeding Mars with oxygen-producing algae as the preliminary step in terraforming the surface. When the oxygen-level inexplicably goes down, a crew is sent from Earth to investigate.

The Titan, (2018), starring Sam Worthington, although not set on Mars, explores the altered-genetic scenario. In the over-populated and conflicted Earth of 2048, scientists have chosen Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, for colonization. Astronauts have their DNA infused with animal DNA, with the goal of creating a new species, Homo Titaniens, who can survive the deadly atmosphere and, in this enhanced state, with wing-flaps developed under their arms, the genetically-altered astronauts can fly.

It might be that Elon Musk is still living in a dream that has lost its shelf life. David Cox, in The Guardian, said:

The Mariner and Viking programmes revealed what Mars was actually like. Its "canals" had already been exposed as an optical illusion. Oxygen was absent and atmospheric pressure was too low to allow water to liquefy. There was no global magnetic field to provide protection from the cosmic and solar radiation that would obliterate any form of life. Inevitably, these disappointing discoveries changed the place of Mars on humanity's mental map. Films began to reflect this. Martians themselves began to be relegated to comic status in films such as Martians Go Home (1989), Mars Attacks! (1996) and Mars Needs Moms (2011).

Full circle back to the early 50s (e.g. Abbott and Costello Go to Mars.)

Since late last century, hundreds of new planets have been discovered – 700 at last count - including Kepler 22-b which most likely has water and a liveable atmosphere. Upside: the temperature there is a comfortable 22°C. Downside: It is 638 light-years away; one light-year measures about 9.5 trillion km!

One of the avowed goals of a ‘two-planet species’ is an alternative Earth- a safeguard against extinction - similar to a back-up drive on a computer. But why go 50 million km to an inhospitable planet to store your ‘drive’?

Mars is vulnerable to the same catastrophes that threaten Earth, not to mention possible problems with the Sun, which both planets share. We would actually need a completely new solar system for real security, if that is even possible - or necessary.

Regarding the theory of terraforming Mars: wouldn’t it be more practical and cheaper to terraform the Moon? The Moon is just as inhospitable but right around the corner.

And as a first practical step to doing this to another planet, how about renovating the hundreds of deserts and the Australian outback to support Earth’s growing population problem? First steps first. Why waste billions on Mars when settlers will have to live out their lives in greenhouses?

We might also use that money to create self-sustaining mega-space stations, off-shore, so to speak, that could support hundreds of thousands of people like in the film, Elysium, enabling frequent, practical and inexpensive trips back and forth.

Elysium (2013) stars Matt Damon and Jodie Foster and takes place in 2145 when the Earth is polluted and overcrowded. A giant revolving space platform above the Earth, called Elysium, is the upper-class ‘neighbourhood’ of the wealthy and powerful. The poor and sick have to remain on Earth, but technology and state-of-art hospital equipment exist on Elysium that can heal any disease and even regenerate failed body parts. Disenfranchised residents stuck on Earth want access to this technology but it is forbidden to them. The drama consists in the struggle of a group of Earth-dwellers attempting to travel to Elysium to access the medical technology to heal their families.

When we get there, if we don't find any life on Mars, from that point on there will be life on Mars because we'll bring it there. Buzz Aldrin

In 2017, US Congress passed the NASA Authorization Act, which allotted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration 20 billion dollars and a mandate to get humans beings ‘near or on the surface of Mars in 2030s.’ NASA outlined how this will be done, with the Moon as a stop-over point:

The human exploration of Mars crosses three thresholds, each with increasing challenges as humans move farther from Earth: Earth Reliant [now until the mid-2020s], the Proving Ground [2018-2030], and Earth Independent [now to 2030s and beyond].

NASA already has rovers exploring the surface of Mars, searching for water and oxygen, and is planning to send another one in 2020. Elon Musk wants to establish a permanent settlement there, of 80,000 people, by 2040.

In Buzz Aldrin’s book, Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration, Aldrin believes that astronauts should view the trip like the early pilgrims did: as settlers planning to live out the rest of their lives there - without ever thinking of returning to Earth.

The First is a human drama series, not science fiction. Just as Bradbury relocated stories for The Martian Chronicles on the Red Planet, so could The First be situated in any time and place - the story would essentially be the same: a father in a risky line-of-work, in harm’s way, requiring long hours away from family; sustained uncertainty and depression, in the partner who has to remain home, the unthinkable ‘phone call’ that could occur day or night, announcing tragedy - and alienation from children, who resort to rebellion and substance abuse.

Victoria Segal, of The Sunday Times (UK) wrote, ‘The First is not sci-fi: the bugs here are in the emotional systems, the errors entirely human. As a result, it has the right dramatic stuff.’

Other critics have not been so kind. Lucy Mangan, of The Guardian, really put her boot in:

Sean Penn runs sleeveless up and down his neighbourhood as astronaut Tom Haggerty [sic] in The First… the thought arrives unbidden that you could add the body fat of him and his erstwhile love Madonna together and still not have enough to fry an egg… We are some time in the near future. The clothes and cars look the same, but everything is voice activated by software that actually works… Meanwhile, Tom goes home and takes a razor to his beard of self-pity with the aid of some Deepening Resolution shaving foam and sets his jaw in preparation for whatever the rest of the series has in store for him; an agglomeration of slickly executed, gloriously uninvolving scenes he will continue to phone in…

which was aptly countered by Ed Cumming, of The Independent:

With his usual skill of hinting at great wells of rage and empathy, Penn lifts Hegarty [sic] above these clichés. He is in fighting shape, perhaps after months of using punch-bags with the faces of literary critics stuck on, and looks like he is on the hunt for a scrap.

As of this writing, The First has neither been cancelled, nor renewed, for a second season. I guess the jury is still out as to whether such non-sci-fi sci-fi has enough of an audience appeal to sustain another eight episodes. Richard Roeper, in the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote: ‘unlike most dystopian-future films and TV shows, there’s often an optimistic, we-can-do-anything, America-is-great tone to the storytelling’.

Further seasons would also be crucially contingent on getting Sean Penn back on board again, and that might depend on availability between other film projects – and whether he wants to get himself back on that treadmill.